This volume covers three thousand years of African history beginning with reports about the ancient kingdoms of Ethiopia and Kush, ancient and medieval... trade routes, including China's discovery of Africa; the history of the East Coast; the Nilotic Slave trade, kingdoms and court life in Inner East Africa, the appearance of Indian and white settlers, and merchants and colonialists. The texts include important local authorities and scholars as well as travelers and administrators from Britain, Portugal, Switzerland, India, and China. Modern times are considered in the documents of Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, Milton Obote and Julius Nyerere.

African Americans and others in the African diaspora have increasingly “come home” to Africa to visit the sites at which their ancestors were... enslaved and shipped. In this nuanced analysis of homecoming, Katharina Schramm analyzes how a shared rhetoric of the (Pan-)African family is produced among African hosts and Diasporan returnees and at the same time contested in practice. She examines the varying interpretations and appropriations of significant sites (e.g. the slave forts), events (e.g. Emancipation Day) and discourses (e.g. repatriation) in Ghana to highlight these dynamics. From this, she develops her notions of diaspora, home, homecoming, memory and identity that reflect the complexity and multiple reverberations of these cultural encounters beyond the sphere of roots tourism.

Organized by major themes such as creation stories, and resistance to oppression this collection gather works of imagination, politics and history,... religion, and culture from many societies and across recorded time. Asante and Abarry marshal together ancient, anonymous writers whose texts were originally written on stone and papyri and the well-known public figures of more recent times whose spoken and written words have shaped the intellectual history of the diaspora. Within this remarkably wide-ranging volume are such sources as prayers and praise songs from ancient Kemet and Ethiopia along with African American spirituals; political commentary from C.L.R. James, Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Joseph Nyerere; stirring calls for social justice from David Walker, Abdias Nacimento, Franzo Fanon, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Featuring newly translated texts and documents published for the first time, the volume also includes an African chronology, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. With this landmark book, Asante and Abarry offer a major contribution to the ongoing debates on defining the African canon. Author note: Molefi Kete Asante is Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Temple University and author of several books, including "The Afrocentric Idea" (Temple) and "The Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans". Abu S. Abarry is Assistant Chair of African American Studies at Temple University.

Compared with Asia or Latin America, Africa has experienced much higher rates of emigration of its intelligentsia to North America and Europe, and... frequent displacement within the continent. This rare overview of the history, fate and future roles explores their relationship to nationalism and the Pan African project; the indigenous language of African intellectuals; women intellectuals; and the role of the expanding African academic diaspora.

An important work in the field of diaspora studies for the past decade, this collection has inspired scholars and others to explore a trail blazed... originally by Melville J. Herskovits, the father of New World African studies. Since its original publication, the field has changed considerably. Africanism has been explored in its broader dimensions, particularly in the area of white Africanisms. Thus, the new edition has been revised and expanded. Joseph E. Holloway has written three essays for the new volume. The first uses a transnational framework to examine how African cultural survivals have changed over time and readapted to diasporic conditions while experiencing slavery, forced labor, and racial discrimination. The second essay is "Africanisms in African American Names in the United States." The third reconstructs Gullah history, citing numerous Africanisms not previously identified by others. In addition, "The African Heritage of White America" by John Phillips has been revised to take note of many more instances of African cultural survivals in white America and to present a new synthesis of approaches.

Africanity Redefined: Collected Essays of Ali A. Mazrui, Volume I is the first of three volumes of Ali A. Mazrui's most important essays. The eventual... three-volume work will provide readers with a broad spectrum of Professor Mazrui's writings during his four decades as a scholar and public intellectual. This first volume redefines the meaning of Africanity across geographical spaces, time, and cultures. The resulting definition is dynamic. It forces us to reject neo-imperialist paradigms and ontologies of what it means to be African. By encouraging us to think about Africanity as an idea rather than as point of origin, the ideas contained in these essays force us to reposition ourselves in the debate of our place in global cultures and civilizations, and they prepare us to take a more active role in social and political affairs.

Africanizing Anthropology tells the story of the anthropological fieldwork centered at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia (now... Zambia) during the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on collaborative processes rather than on the activity of individual researchers, Lyn Schumaker gives the assistants and informants of anthropologists a central role in the making of anthropological knowledge. Schumaker shows how local conditions and local ideas about culture and history, as well as previous experience of outsiders’ interest, shape local people’s responses to anthropological fieldwork and help them, in turn, to influence the construction of knowledge about their societies and lives. Bringing to the fore a wide range of actors—missionaries, administrators, settlers, the families of anthropologists—Schumaker emphasizes the daily practices of researchers, demonstrating how these are as centrally implicated in the making of anthropological knowlege as the discipline’s methods. Selecting a prominent group of anthropologists—The Manchester School—she reveals how they achieved the advances in theory and method that made them famous in the 1950s and 1960s. This book makes important contributions to anthropology, African history, and the history of science.

This book is the first general introduction to African languages and linguistics to be published in English. It covers the four major language groupings... (Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic and Khoisan), the core areas of modern theoretical linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax), typology, sociolinguistics, comparative linguistics, and language, history and society. Basic concepts and terminology are explained for undergraduates and nonspecialist readers, but each chapter also provides an overview of the state of the art in its field, and as such will be referred to by more advanced students and general linguists.

African Leadership in the Twentieth Century represents the most comprehensive analysis of African leadership to date. It offers both historical and... contemporary insights on how African leadership successfully achieved independence, but failed to improve the quality of African life. The study's critical analysis provides imperatives for future African leadership in the 21st century.

How do we resolve the insider/outsider interpreting conundrum? Why do readers from different parts of the world read, interpret, or understand foreign... literatures the way they do? What drives peculiar critical reactions, canon formations and such issues which determine the survival of cultural productions or their continued adoption as useful bolsters for a people's self-definition or indeed self-preservation and self-determination? African Literature: Gender Discourse, Religious Values, and the African Worldview offers a series of fresh insights into most of the old "problematics" which used to sustain the interpretations of African literature, especially by women. Students, scholars, and general readers wishing to consider issues of gender in relation to African cultural and socioeconomic systems and what Salami-Boukari interrogates and names as an "African worldview," will find the interdisciplinary discussion of historical analyses, literary criticism and gender discourses a useful method for engaging contemporary African perspectives.

Fiction. African American Studies. Set in Yvonne Vera's native country of Zimbabwe, NEHANDA tells the story of a late nineteenth century village where a... young woman has been given a divine calling: the gift to inspire a war. Told in beautifully lucid and evocative prose, this is the portrait of resistance and struggle, a tale of a people's first meeting with colonialism. A stunning, beautiful and poetic novel. --The Herald (Zimbabwe)

In these lively life stories, women market traders from Ghana comment on changing social and economic times and on reasons for their prosperity or... decline in fortunes. Gracia Clark shows that market women are intimately connected with economic policy on a global scale. Many work at the intersection of sophisticated networks of transnational commerce and migration. They have dramatic memories of independence and the growth of their new nation, including political rivalries, price controls, and violent raids on the market. The experiences of these women give substance to their reflections on globalization, capital accumulation, colonialism, technological change, environmental degradation, teenage pregnancy, marriage, children, changing gender roles, and spirituality. Clark's commentary illuminates the complex historical and cultural setting of these deeply revealing lives.

The book includes one hundred colour plates accompanied by in-depth descriptions, as well as numerous black-and-white photographs of the masks as they... are used in religious and secular ceremonies. An introductory text by renowned scholars describes how the masks are made, examines their significance in African culture and offers insight into the universal practice of masquerading. A unique contribution to the literature on African art, this book is also a wonderful introduction to countless fascinating, age-old spiritual traditions still practised today.

This short new monograph serves as an authoritative introduction to an unusual people of eastern Africa known as Swahili. Middleton, who has known... these people for a half a century, describes their highly stratified, merchant society and civilization, documenting their importance both for anthropologists and for others interested in Africa. Swahili continue today their centuries-old role as merchants in long-distance international trade, a role that has led them to form a society very distinct from any other in Africa. Middleton's brief, personal treatment discusses Swahili recorded history as an integral part of their rich tradition and civilization. He clears up past confusions and mistaken assumptions without trying to define a single "Swahili" identity. His lucid approach unravels contradictions about Swahili being merchants and yet fishermen, who live in both cities as well as small villages, and who reckon various kinds of kinship and marriage. Swahili are often considered by non-Swahili as being both Africans and Arabs, but Middleton shows that they remain African despite having long adopted Islam and many aspects of Arab and Asian cultures.